Address to Jessup Competitors
case (and I speak with authority on the topic!) does not mean that the arguments were weak or badly made. The role of the judge is to decide, the role of the advocate is to advance the best available arguments with zeal and clarity.
The world can be a better place from the skills you have gained because of it. The success of a public international moot contest should remind us of the power and the importance of public international law as a force for good in a fragile world. What that law has brought to our world is a grand topic not to be comprehensively defined in a short speech. But we cannot escape the re- ality of conflict, and it is not trivial to note the rel- evance to current affairs of public international law and the perpetual difficulties nations have in adapting to its norms. History is littered with grand peace settlements which dispose of the past controversy and promise eternal friendship: Westphalia (1648), Utrecht (1713), Paris (1763), Vienna (1815), Versailles (1871), Versailles (1919). Splendid sentiments expressed, elegantly, but often ineffective in bringing closure to the con- flict in the long term. However, over the past 65 years we can see the transformation of public international law in the new world order.
I want to offer, if it does not seem too patronis- ing, some thoughts about lawyers and their role in advising clients on the rights and obligations of states. That this is a privilege but also a chal- lenge can be seen from the example of a public international lawyer who had great talent and the prospects of a splendid career - Helmuth James, Count von Moltke. He was in a sense legally bilingual. One grandfather, James Innes, was a chief justice (in South Africa) in the com- mon law; and one, Count von Moltke, was a legendary Prussian war hero. Helmuth James grew up in Germany. He studied in Berlin and in London. He qualified and practised as a German lawyer, and was called as a barrister to the Eng- lish bar by the Inner Temple in 1938. He was a pupil in Chambers at 2 Hare Court, where I prac-
tised 60 years later. He thought of staying there, but decided to leave practice at the English bar in 1938 and return to Germany in the hope of doing some good.
The von Moltke family possessed a vast estate called Kreisau, in Silesia, which today lies in Poland. Huge privilege, almost feudal in atmo- sphere, but those who spent weekends there, the Kreisau circle, were known for liberal think- ing. Helmuth James had a lovely and coura- geous wife, Freya, who died at the age of 98 on January 1, 2010. They wrote hundreds of letters to each other. He enjoyed a good sermon, or a good essay, or a good talk with an old friend.
Germany in 1938 was a country where dreadful deeds were being done by the state. The rules were precise. Shortly after the election of Hit- ler’s government in 1933, a series of new laws were enacted. Jews could not serve in the civil service; a quota limited the number of Jewish children in state schools and colleges; no Jews could be employed in the media; no marriage with non-Jews was allowed (the Law to Protect German Blood and German Honour – zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre); no teaching by Jews to non-Jews; their pass- ports bore a red “J”; no practice of medicine or law by Jews; no university degrees for Jews; no Jews allowed in swimming pools. Then, in No- vember 1938, came Kristallnacht. Synagogues were burned and shops destroyed; the insur- ance compensation moneys were seized by the state; and the Jews were fined for owning the looted property.
And so deprivation of civil rights was achieved, then economic ruin, leading to the next stage: physical elimination. Some thousands emigrat- ed, but other countries did not make that easy, and the Nazi state at first limited and then pro- hibited emigration. None of this was secret. The laws were very clear and their effects known to all of Europe.
ILSA Quarterly » volume 20 » issue 4 » May 2012
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